Summary: She spends her days counting the minutes, waiting for some unknown extraordinary event to occur, and—in the most subtle way possible—it does. One-shot. UlquiHime.
Disclaimer: Bleach © Kubo Tite
Notes: I'm not going to give anything away here, but yeah. Tiny/serious warning. It's kind of dark and depressing and the ending may make you slightly uncomfortable. Don't finish it if you don't want to.
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Serendipitous
obsidianightmares
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She checks her watch. 7:20 AM. Work starts at 8. She'll probably get there on time. She pushes back her bright, ginger hair, leans her elbow against the windowsill and looks outside. The day is still young, the sun is still waking up, its glow washed out by the light, faded blue sky with splashes of feathery clouds. She leans her forehead against the window and exhales. The surface turns misty, and with a finger, she writes delicately— "O-ri-hi-me." She leans back again, and quietly watches as her little message fades, syllable by syllable.
7:25. People pile into the bus and sit wherever they can. She watches as three tourists sit a few rows in front of her, laughing and talking rapidly in a foreign tongue. She looks away. It's rude to stare.
7:29. No one different or interesting-looking enters. Again, she turns to the window. The scene never changes, it's always the the same trees, the same buildings, the same houses, the same people selling the same things on the same, old roadside. She idly wonders whether others, too, ever get tired of the monotony of their schedule. As humans, no one ever likes being forced to adhere to the rules and regulations. So why do it? Because after all, what's the point of living if you don't like it?
7:33. The bus stops again. A bird flies in. Several of the passengers scream and some even menacingly wave their umbrellas at it. The bird flies out. The screaming stops. Nothing changes.
7:38. A man steps onto the bus. Her eyes widen. A new passenger. How odd; no one new ever enters. It is a rather curious development. He sits in the seat diagonally in front of hers. She shifts her position slightly. She wants to get a good look at his face. She catches a glimpse of dark locks and pale skin. He turns, probably sensing her. She quickly looks up, and pretends to enjoy looking at the ceiling of the bus. A few moments later, she glances back at him. He's not looking at her anymore. She flicks her forehead. Has she already forgotten? It's rude to stare.
7:44. He gets off. He walks down the street. He is a stranger to her. She is a stranger to him. Even so, she can't stop thinking about those empty and unreadable jade eyes, which she only caught a glimpse of, but that glimpse was enough for her to make an assumption.
He looks so...alone.
—•—
She sits in the bus again. The sun is nowhere to be seen; patches of dark and light grey have taken over the sky. The wind whispers and howls and warns the passengers on the bus of the oncoming thunderstorm. The wind's warnings don't matter too much to her. She likes the rain, she likes the clear freshness and the cool feeling that hangs in the air molecules once it's over.
It's 4:29 PM. Work is over; all she wants to do right now is go home, take a bubble bath and eat a scrumptious dinner of pasta with bacon and strawberry syrup. Although there is something else on her mind, something involving strikingly fascinating jade eyes and ebony hair. Why does she even care about him? Why is he important? He isn't, but she's curious. She's always been naturally curious. And curiosity may have killed the cat, but she definitely isn't a cat. Proverbs are so silly sometimes.
4:34. The same group of foreigners from the morning get on. Their population has, however, increased. Look away. Some glance at her. She smiles kindly. She doesn't want to smile.
4:37. More and more and more people get on. It's odd, she thinks; there hadn't been so many people this morning.
4:42. The bus is almost completely full. She wonders how it happened—it'd been half empty in the morning. Maybe more people just want to use the bus now because it's much more convenient on such a rainy day. Yes, that must be it.
4:46. She waits. He doesn't come. Nobody does.
4:49. Maybe he takes a different bus home.
4:51. There are too many bus stops. She really wants to take a bubble bath.
4:52. He finally steps onto the bus. His mystifying eyes scan the bus. There's one seat remaining, and strangely, it's right next to hers. How convenient. He looks at her once, makes his way over and sits down. She glances at him. He catches her. She smiles, and looks away.
"Why do you look at me so much?" His voice is low, and so emotionless, she almost wonders if he's a robot or an alien or a mixture of the two.
Her eyes widen at the question, and a light pinkish glow blossoms on her cheeks. "Do I? Please forgive me. I'm just curious."
"Curious?"
"Uh-huh. You seem very interesting to me." She feels like a stalker.
He doesn't say anything.
She bites her lip. "Not in a weird way or anything, just...you seem different, unique. It's a good thing, take it as a compliment."
"A compliment," he repeats.
"Yep," she says cheerfully. "I'm sorry if it makes you uncomfortable. I just can't help myself sometimes."
"Do as you please, woman," he says. "I do not need you to justify your actions."
What a strange way of talking! This piques her curiosity even more. "Oh, uh, thanks. I guess. What's your name?"
He seems hesitant. Finally, he says, "Ulquiorra."
"Oh, that's a nice name!" And a queer one, she forgets to add. "I'm Orihime. Where are you from?"
"Around here," Ulquiorra responds vaguely.
"Ah, well, um. So am I." She giggles. She decides not to press him any further; he seems quite bothered already. She sighs. It's all right. He probably just isn't very social, and hence isn't very used to having conversations with strangers.
The bus stops. It's 5:03. She turns to Ulquiorra and smiles. "Well, it was really nice meeting you. I'll be off now. See you tomorrow! Or whenever." She hastily adds the last two words. Who knows, maybe he won't be there tomorrow. Maybe he is a dream. Maybe he is a fabricated image produced by the lonely part of her mind that wants nothing but good company. He nods.
She walks out. Wait! She wants to go back in. Just for a moment. The doors close. Oh. Well, there's always tomorrow.
—•—
The weather gods (if those exist) are furious today. Blame them for having such serious mood swings. The sun burns the road and it burns the people and it burns her brain. Or, at least, she wants to blame the sun for her inability to think. It could've been the mushroom flavoured ice cream yesterday, it tasted kind of weird. Well, actually, the most logical option is her unfortunate inability to sleep. Insomnia is never a good thing, particularly when one has to wake up at 6 every morning in order to get onto the bus and head over to the office for work.
7:23 AM. She is tired. She hardly got any sleep last night. She wonders whether it'd be impolite to fall asleep...but she doesn't care. Sleep is a force that never fails to overpower her will to stay awake. She sleeps.
7:40. Her eyes flutter open. A woman is shaking her. The woman smiles apologetically. "I'm so sorry for disturbing you. I was just wondering if my friend and I could sit here. There's another seat there"—she pointed toward the front of the bus—"if you don't mind. Again, I'm really very sorry!"
She doesn't mind. She smiles and says "Of course," cheerfully, and slips out of the seat and walks to the front of the bus. She checks every row for an empty seat, until she finds one, next to a familiar person.
He turns. "It is you again, woman."
She is almost tired of these ridiculous coincidences. "Oh, good morning, Ulquiorra-kun! And I thought I told you my name, it's Orihime. You can stop calling me 'woman', you know." She laughs a little and sits down next to him.
"I prefer to not call anyone by their first name, I find it distasteful," he says. "You do not have to confer with me any longer if this fact bothers you."
"It doesn't bother me, it's just slightly unusual, but that isn't a bad thing," she points out. "Life gets boring when it's too normal."
"If you say so," he grumbles, but she knows that he agrees with her.
"I wonder, though," she says quietly, "why you felt that I wouldn't want to talk to you just because you called me 'woman'."
He takes a few moments. "People do not talk to me, for many reasons. They stay away. I felt that you might want to stay away too, and it would be best if you did."
She frowns. "I'm not like other people. Besides, maybe you push them away as well. You should let people in sometime. It's really nice, actually, to know that someone's there for you."
"They do not care enough," he responds, his voice completely devoid of emotion. "They do not care enough about me."
She opens her mouth again, but he stands up and the bus stops moving. "I will leave now."
"Oh, right," she says. 7:44. She smiles at him. "See you, then!" He nods silently, again, and departs.
She understands him better.
—•—
"Why do you take such a keen interest in me?" he asks her. "Why do you always take the seat nearest to mine?"
She raises her eyebrows. "I...I don't know. Maybe it's because you're always alone."
"You take pity on me, then?"
"No," she says, with a soft smile. A series of memories flashed through her mind—her brother's accident; her lover marrying another woman; her best, and perhaps only, friend leaving the country, never to be heard from, ever again. "It's because I'm the same as you."
—•—
The days are clearer, so is her smile, and so is her mind. She looks for the reason, but she doesn't need to. It's right beside her, for (roughly) five minutes in the morning and (again, roughly) ten minutes in the afternoon. She speaks to him, gets him to open up, and slowly but surely she feels like she's unraveling his inner thoughts now.
She begins to like him, he begins to overtake her thoughts. She cannot imagine a day without meeting him in the morning and afternoon. He even smiles sometimes (although rarely) much to her surprise.
One afternoon, he enters the bus and promptly sits next to her. Although he has not lost that emotionless look, his eyes look brighter and more aware.
"I found something on the street." He holds out a white seashell. "I would like it if you kept it."
She looks at it, then looks at him. She bites the insides of her cheeks to hold in her tears. Why's this making her so emotional? It's just a seashell. "I..."
"Do you not like it?" he asks quietly.
She laughs and nods. "I love it."
And all of a sudden, she does something that surprises both of them equally—she leans in and kisses his cheek for a second, before pulling back, her cheeks bright red, and taking the seashell from him. "Thank you."
She thought she saw a ghost of a smile fracture that impassive façade of his for a split second. Definitely imagining it.
4:59 PM.
—•—
"What is a relationship?" he asks.
She almost jumps at the suddenness of the question. She wasn't expecting this sort of question from him. Nonetheless, she thinks about it. "Well, I'd say a relationship is a natural bond between two people, and what makes the bond strong is love. There are different types of relationships, though, like there are different kinds of love."
He is silent for a moment before asking, "What is our relationship?"
She doesn't find this question that surprising, because she's been wondering the same thing. "I don't know. We obviously aren't family, and I wouldn't say we're friends, so..." Her voice trailed off.
They look at each other for a while. She moves closer to him, until their faces are less than an inch apart. She closes her eyes and plants her lips onto his, quickly, before he can push her away. He is petrified for a second, but a moment later, he relaxes, and responds by awkwardly touching her cheek. She almost laughs.
When they pull away, they are greeted by an awkward silence, which she breaks by giggling and softly murmuring, "That answers your question, hopefully."
And for the first time, she sees a genuine smile on his face.
—•—
"I like it when you smile," she says, humming softly. "It makes you look happier."
He smiles.
—•—
It is sudden. She almost doesn't know. But when she does, something within her cracks. It's like a weak tree branch that snaps so easily and it pains, oh god it pains so fucking much for that one horrendous second. And then the initial pain goes away, but it's done now and it can't ever be undone, and the damage lasts almost as a reminder, to those who suffered, of the fact that everything ends and everything gets ruined and happy endings simply don't exist in real life.
She looks out the window of the bus, the way she had the first time she'd seen him. Like the last of the autumn leaves that hang limply from the branches, he is gradually disappearing. And her smile is fading away. And her capability of falling in love has been thrown into some dark corner of her mind, gathering dust and filmy memory-cobwebs.
Whose fault is it, really? He was a coward. He was afraid of love. He ran away. He looked for happiness in things that he knew would only lead to his downfall, drowned himself in his sorrows and pushed away her help. But isn't it her fault too, for letting him rot away in front of her and not doing anything about it? He'd been dying and she'd never even noticed.
It's just another thing to add to her list: her brother's accident; her lover marrying another woman; her best, and perhaps only, friend leaving the country; her first boyfriend's death.
Tears slip out of her eyes and run along her cheeks, and she doesn't realize she's crying until she sees small teardrops on her skirt. She wipes her eyes. It's the first time she's shown any kind of emotion since his death. "At least I can feel something," she mumbles. "That's a good sign. I wouldn't want to end up like him." She chuckles weakly.
So, she sits alone again, exhausted and bored, while people gossip about her loss in hushed whispers and occasionally send sympathetic glances in her direction. She ignores them. She doesn't need their pity. She doesn't even look at them anymore, or count the minutes because time isn't so valuable anymore. She presses her nose against the window and exhales; she writes a different name.
And she just watches, as it—exactly like its owner—slowly fades until it can't be seen at all, ever again.
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